How A Drive On The Interstate Can Drive You Crazy

I've been thinking about mounting a death ray on my car. I know it's a crazy idea; an accessory like that is going to be expensive and hard on the engine. But I figure it's worth it.

I want a button on my dash, right next to the cigarette lighter. The next time someone cuts in front of me on the expressway, I'll smile thinly and push the button, and that will be that. The jerk and his car will be surrounded by a bright red aura. The bracing smell of hot metal and emulsified rubber will fill the air. Then, zot, the car will be gone.

I admire men who are sedate drivers, who are able to insulate themselves from the idiots of the world, who just shrug their shoulders and laugh softly at tailgaters and wild weavers.

Trouble is, I don't actually know any men like this.

Most men are like me: They tell themselves not to take it personally when somebody does something stupid out on the highway, but they always simmer inside, and more often than not they have to find a way to let off the steam. I used to be a stoic myself -- hardly even honked -- but I got over it. These days I bellow with an operatic fervor when other drivers offend me. I make eye contact, and then, even if I know they are too far to hear what I'm saying, I talk to them.

I talk to them the same way I talk to my cats at home, figuring that maybe a small percentage of what I'm saying might get through, knowing that even if it doesn't it's great therapy. Sometimes I end up laughing. It may sound maniacal, but it's a hell of a lot better than what's happening in LA.

You've probably heard: In LA, the drivers are shooting each other. There are so many reported freeway shootings in Los Angeles -- all of them by males -- that the Guardian Angels, a group of anti-crime vigilantes who usually spend their time patroling the subways of New York City, have flown out to the coast to help.

Great. So now the Guardian Angels have decided that the freeways of LA have more crazies to worry about than the subways of New York. Trends always start in California and migrate across the rest of the country, right? So in a few weeks freeway shootings will catch on everywhere, and we'll all be reading headlines like ''We Are Buying More Gunracks.''

Women can be just as foolhardly as men in traffic, but they tend to do it with clinical coolness.Men, on the other hand, tend to get into the theater of the event. Maybe we're using the highways to act out our fantasies of being action-adventure heroes. When something makes us angry we become cowboys in a shoot-out, top-guns in a dogfight -- or, as in my own fantasy, sci-fi space jockies with death rays.

I just got back from Miami, where even when I-95 swells out to five lanes you feel like you're trapped in the middle of a 75 mph Zugflume, and where all the cab drivers you meet can tell you stories about drivers getting mad at them and circling the block to come back and wave a gun in their face. Action. Adventure. Everybody wants to be Sonny Crockett.

Maybe we need a new role model. One time at a truck stop I saw a poster of Jesus Christ with his hands outstretched over a big 18-wheeler roaring down the highway. Back then, I thought it was as kitschy and tasteless as those velvet paintings of the Last Supper. These days I'm not so sure.